Gaming & Culture —

E3 2009: Who won? Who lost? Who wins a golden Ars?

E3 is finally over, and it's time to decide who won, who lost, who lived, who …

Is E3 really finished? After weeks of planning and scheduling, a frenzied four days of press conferences, meetings, and demos—not including dozens of games played—we're finally done. While there still may be some coverage coming from our interviews and hands-on time with the games, this is as good a time as any to present our E3 awards.

This was a big show filled with games, parties, lines, headaches, and, of course, celebrities. What rates as a Golden Ars? Here are our picks.

Worst Press Conference Award: Nintendo seemed to want to tell us things we already knew. The MotionPlus is coming, and it's going to be good. Wii Fit Plus is going to be an incremental improvement to the game that won't seem to leave the charts. The system is very popular, and very profitable. While New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2 were fun announcements, both are games based on games we've already played. A Team Ninja take on Metroid with The Other M was the one thing at the show that seemed to get people excited. Nintendo stayed on message, and that's about it.

Bonus insanity: the Vitality Sensor? When Satoru Iwata claimed one day it may help people get to sleep, a very snarky member of the press behind me whispered that Nintendo was doing just fine putting people to sleep already.

Best Hardware Award:The PSP Go. It may be expensive at $250, but getting our hands on the little bugger left us impressed. A bright, clear screen, great sound, and 16GB of memory makes this quite the compelling buy, and a revitalized store filled with classic and new PSP and PSone games available at launch means that you'll never need to buy another PSP game at a store again.

Whether or not that's a good thing is open to opinion, but based on our hands-on time with the system, we're very happy with the build quality of the hardware. That analog pad may get awkward over long playing sessions, though.

Best Motion-Controller: While Microsoft and Sony's offerings may have looked neat, they're a long way off, and there was a nagging feeling that we were looking at magic tricks, not hardware that's ready for consumers. On the other hand, there were many games on the show floor that used the Wii MotionPlus, and the hardware looked and felt great.

Wii Sports Resort was amazingly precise, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 was a huge leap from last year's model, and Shigeru Miyamoto hinted that we may see MotionPlus-enabled sword fighting in the next Zelda release. It's great hardware, it's $20, and it will be out in a matter of days. This was an easy choice.

Pleasant Surprise Award:Scribblenauts! The Warner Bros. title featured a series of increasingly hard puzzles. How do you get through them? By typing in words and using objects. The gimmick is that basically everything is in the game. If you need to distract an animal, type in "steak" and feed it to them. If you need to rescue a kitten, type in "ladder" and grab the animal. If you need to reach something, type in "trampoline" and it's in there. The fun is in trying to find items the game doesn't support, or to beat each level in the shortest amount of turns.

The game had everyone on the show floor talking. If you have a Nintendo DS, this is one to watch. I wish I had the foresight to make my own video, but this one will have to do. Let's talk about how awesome this is: God fights a Kraken, and then Einstein gets in on the action.

Bored by excellence Award: No question: God of War III. I had a chance to play the game for a lengthy session during my booth tour with Sony, and it was great. Amazing, even. Of course, it was also God of War. What I mean is, you know what to expect, you'll be satisfied, you'll buy it and love it... but ultimately there wasn't much of a story to be had when it came to one of Sony's biggest games.

It's the only game at the show where I played it, shrugged, and said "Yup, that is totally badass."

i have to say, game downloads on the 360 would be a lot more enticing if I could get a larger hard drive at a reasonable price. My current 20gb is all but full, and I am really, really hesitant to spend the premium just to get another 100GB of space.

I felt that the PSP Go was a disappointment. The PSP has some great games and media capabilities, but the Go adds almost nothing: 16 GB embedded storage is nice, new form factor is ok, but that's it? Nothing else? The same old RAM/CPU/GPU specs, no touchscreen or tilt capabilities, no major OS improvements, the same old crappy web browser? PSP still has better games, but it's rapidly being outpaced by the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the Palm Pre on all other fronts.

And the price... $250 would be great if they delivered some great improvements, but replacing UMD with 16GB of embedded storage probably lowers manufacturing cost, why should the end user price go up $80? The PS3 $599 launch price was actually justified (to me) with the tech inside. This isn't.

Damn Ben, you got to meat Danny? I think I envy that more than all the rest, which is some, compared to none

This years show just didn't strike me with anything all that special. Project Natal looked interesting, but we already saw what the tech could do. Seeing some kind of tangible product now instead of hypotheticals would have been nice.

L4D2, conflicted, but I'll probably just grab it on sale. Very non-Valve-like on that one.

Nintendo had their usual "We're going to remind ourselves that we make lots and lots of money and can continue to disappoint what was our core audience because, well, we don't fscking need them anymore. Our houses are literally built out of your money. No, not in that it paid for them, rather, we had so much left over we started constructing our homes from $100 bills." conference, no surprises there, but I'm sure I'll grab at least a couple of motion+ and wii sports resort, if not the EA tennis game that uses it.

Otherwise, meh. More like the old e3 in looks, but very lacking in OMGWTFBBQ moments for me.

I'm only 27, how come journalists much older than me just fall over for this stuff without the slightest piece of skepticism?

I wonder the same. I'm sure it (NATAL) will have some fun and interesting applications but the overall practicality of the device is very low. Especially when you consider that it's unable to act as a pointing device and has no buttons. However, maybe motion controls just don't really excite me to begin with so I think Ben got it right in this article by giving it to Nintendo who actually had something to show and sell.

I'm sorry Forza, you will never be half the racing game GT is, has been, and always will be. You're good, no doubt, and you're so much better then the pile of crap cartoon PGR that it's almost mind-blowing... but you are no Gran Turismo.

Case in point - rewinding the action to fix your screw-up. Maybe if you can't race worth a damn, but when I screw up, it's generally 5 or 6 turns prior to the car leaving the tarmac, having messed up something to throw my groove off. You can't "rewind" to try to re-perfect your line in GT. I think the lack of idiot button is a MAJOR feature. Nothing says fun like making up seconds in the last lap or two of a race after losing a commanding lead to a foul up. Having an idiot button just... removes that from play.

Oh, I'm sure you don't have to use it, and if I had a 360 and Forza (which would come as a package, indeed), I wouldn't... but the fact that they thought ruining the reality of their game to please the unskilled was a good idea says bad things about other unheralded changes.

"While New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2 were fun announcements, both are games based on games we've already played. A Team Ninja take on Metroid with The Other M was the one thing at the show that seemed to get people excited. Nintendo stayed on message, and that's about it."

Originally posted by one8kevin:I wonder the same. I'm sure it (NATAL) will have some fun and interesting applications but the overall practicality of the device is very low. Especially when you consider that it's unable to act as a pointing device and has no buttons.

Adding insult to injury was the fact that the first reveal was at a Microsoft press conference for the 360 version. Way to twist the knife into the hearts of PC gamers there, everyone involved.

I don't understand why some of the larger PC developers don't band together and get their own keynote. Ubisoft can get one, but a combined alliance of EA Los Angeles, Valve, Blizzard (assuming they even came, says something) and a few other companies somehow don't?

Originally posted by one8kevin:I wonder the same. I'm sure it (NATAL) will have some fun and interesting applications but the overall practicality of the device is very low. Especially when you consider that it's unable to act as a pointing device and has no buttons.

Do you have fingers? Well then.

Natal, or Natal 2, 3 and the final version 4 is going to be awesome for the holodeck experience. The Windows 7 PC will be all knowing, will even know when Evil Merlin is behind me forcing his MS kielbasa in. All we need is the turntable treadmill and we can go walkabout.

I'm only 27, how come journalists much older than me just fall over for this stuff without the slightest piece of skepticism?

I wonder the same. I'm sure it (NATAL) will have some fun and interesting applications but the overall practicality of the device is very low. Especially when you consider that it's unable to act as a pointing device and has no buttons.

Skepticism is good, if you have enough knowledge to apply it correctly.

Microsoft has actually gone out of their way to do something which is better than state-of-the-art in academic research with Natal. The wiimote+ has pretty much no original research in it (that's all done by the company making the components). The Sony controller (did they have a name for it?) is something you'd do as an undergrad as a class project. (Ie, fun but not particularly impressive.) Natal OTOH seems to be pushing for new original research and doing things no-one has done before.

You could compare it to what Sony/Toshiba/IBM did with the Cell processor. Or what Nintendo did when they brought motion control to the masses. (Motion control did exists before Nintendo, but they did bring it to the masses.)

Only looking at what they have today in Natal (fully body marker less tracking) can revolutionize not only games but a lot of other industries too. Eg I can see voice capture studios using similar tech to capture the physical acting of people as they do voice acting. And you'd better believe that machinima can become a lot more interesting with this tech behind it.

Not much that Microsoft does impresses me. Certainly nothing in the OS market and not much in the software market. But Natal does impress me.

While Microsoft and Sony's offerings may have looked neat, they're a long way off, and there was a nagging feeling that we were looking at magic tricks, not hardware that's ready for consumers.

Wait what? You viewed a prototype a year ago, and it sounded like you considered it ready for consumers then. I mean I considered that article proof that the technology is farther along than all the naysayers were suggesting, and now the person who wrote that article is a naysayer too? Makes my head hurt!

This is the second article on ARS that implies that MS will start accepting direct Credit Card payments for everything - but other sites I've read imply that it'll just be for the full game download service.Which is it?Will MS finally allow credit card payments for all aspects of the Marketplace?

Quote - "The Update Everyone Wanted Award: You'll soon be able to buy things from Xbox Live without buying points! Yay! No more leftovers!"

Originally posted by alexjohnc3:"While New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2 were fun announcements, both are games based on games we've already played. A Team Ninja take on Metroid with The Other M was the one thing at the show that seemed to get people excited. Nintendo stayed on message, and that's about it."

Thats no remake! ::drools with delight:: God I wanted all the rumors of a cube version to be true, never were. I'd take a Wii-version any time now. Sweet delicious Golden Sun.

I highly recommend people download the Assassin's Creed 2 trailer (I know its on the psn) because its quite different than the one I saw during the Sony E3 conference, and oh man did it get me pumped. I loved the first one, very excited for this one.

/Uncharted 2, could be the greatest collection of 1s and 0s ever. Literally started playing through the first one again because its so damn good

One important thing about Natal is that it is NOT restricted to specific devices...meaning vendors can find ways to further enhance their offering with appropriately designed additional props and periphs that work in conjunction with the Natal features.

As many reviewers pointed out, one of the more natural experiences was the adapted driving game. Even without a wheel many of them found the controls to be more natural and intuitive than a real wheel, and picked up the game mechanics instantly. Now imagine selling a free-standing wheel that included paddles for shifting and a button for boost/firing (for those kinds of driving games) and you get the idea of how natal can work with other hardware instead of just flatly replacing your controller...

Wait what? You viewed a prototype a year ago, and it sounded like you considered it ready for consumers then. I mean I considered that article proof that the technology is farther along than all the naysayers were suggesting, and now the person who wrote that article is a naysayer too? Makes my head hurt!

What the Natal is claiming to do goes far beyond what I saw in that demo, and at E3 the camera was kept behind closed doors and shown in limited demo form to a very few outlets and some celebrities. I'm not naysaying, and I'm not saying it's going to be wonderful. I'm saying I need more information before I say much of anything.

quote:

More like "Who won, who lost, who cares?" Giving awards for things that aren't even out yet is ludicrous.

Completely agreed, which is why we tried to make the awards ludicrous as well.

I can't understand how removing hardware from the PSP and making the unit smaller make it more expensive. Flash memory is dirt cheap these days, so it can't even be that. They're just trying to recoup their losses on the PS3.

Originally posted by Viking ZX:I don't understand why some of the larger PC developers don't band together and get their own keynote. Ubisoft can get one, but a combined alliance of EA Los Angeles, Valve, Blizzard (assuming they even came, says something) and a few other companies somehow don't?

Blizzard has Blizzcom, which is like a 3 day long keynote, so they probably wouldn't be interested. Same thing with id and quakecon. EA and Valve are happy to take the exclusivity cash and let someone else foot the bill for the presentation, so probably don't have any incentive to band together.

On the topic of L4D2, I just realized that in the poster the hand is giving 'the Vs'. Maybe Valve was trying to tell their fans something after all.

And hey, Ars - want to give us some details of Forza 3? I haven't seen any coverage of it (or some other big games) here on the site. I almost thought that you didn't send anyone to the show this year.

ninja edit - Hesacon, Sony is having to give some profit margin to the retailers, so I'd guess that was at least $30 of the price jump, maybe more. It's actually fairly competitively priced compared to a 16gb ipod touch.

I am extremely disappointed that you didn't post one picture of a hot booth babe. Oh, wait, that's because all the OTHER sites are probably already spamming that, so no sense in being like everyone else.

Originally posted by Hesacon:I can't understand how removing hardware from the PSP and making the unit smaller make it more expensive. Flash memory is dirt cheap these days, so it can't even be that. They're just trying to recoup their losses on the PS3.

Not to mention a bad positioning of the controls...and only one analog again.

Originally posted by BBBoT:This is the second article on ARS that implies that MS will start accepting direct Credit Card payments for everything - but other sites I've read imply that it'll just be for the full game download service.Which is it?Will MS finally allow credit card payments for all aspects of the Marketplace?

Quote - "The Update Everyone Wanted Award: You'll soon be able to buy things from Xbox Live without buying points! Yay! No more leftovers!"

You'll notice that MS even didn't show it being used as a pointing device in their fantasy video, while Nintendo and (especially) Sony demonstrated some pretty remarkable accuracy as a pointing device.

Originally posted by Hesacon:I can't understand how removing hardware from the PSP and making the unit smaller make it more expensive. Flash memory is dirt cheap these days, so it can't even be that. They're just trying to recoup their losses on the PS3.

Actually, a lot of that money may be going to the retailers, who need an incentive to carry the unit, as they won't be making it up on the back end by selling games.

Typically, the margins on hardware are razor thin. That's why the hardware is always more or less the same price no matter where you shop. The real money comes from selling tons of games at a higher margin. Since there's no physical distribution with the Go!, retailers needed some incentive to stock it.

The upside side of this is that it will give those retailers more wiggle room when it comes to pricing. It's entirely possible that you'll see Amazon or Wal-Mart selling the Go! for a good bit less than $250.